Inaugural Lecture | Abdulhamit Subasi

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer science concerned with building smart machines capable of performing tasks, which need human intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence has led to significant improvements in the areas of healthcare such as medical imaging, automated clinical decision-making, diagnosis, prognosis, and more.

The use of Artificial Intelligence is predicted to decrease medical costs as there will be more accuracy in diagnosis and better predictions in the treatment plan as well as more prevention of disease.

The main objective of health-related Artificial Intelligence applications is to analyze relationships between prevention or treatment techniques and patient outcomes. Artificial Intelligence programs are applied to practices such as disease diagnosis, treatment, drug development, personalized medicine, and patient monitoring and care. Artificial Intelligence algorithms can also be used to analyze large amounts of data through electronic health records for disease prevention and diagnosis.

With cardiovascular, neurological disorders and cancer consistently being the top causes of death, it is imperative that as many resources as possible are being utilized to aid in early detection, diagnosis and treatment. The implementation of artificial intelligence provides benefits in early detection.

Artificial Intelligence is already being used to detect diseases, such as cancer, more accurately and in their early stages. The spread of medical wearables and devices combined with Artificial Intelligence is also being applied to oversee early-stage heart disease, enabling doctors and other caregivers to better monitor and detect potentially life-threatening episodes at earlier, more treatable stages.

Artificial Intelligence is being studied within the radiology field to detect and diagnose diseases within patients through Computerized Tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance (MR) Imaging. The focus on Artificial Intelligence in radiology has rapidly increased in recent years. Through imaging in oncology, Artificial Intelligence has been able to serve well for detecting abnormalities and monitoring change over time; two key factors in oncological health. 

• An Artificial Intelligence -enabled radiology assistant receive imaging scans and automatically analyzes them for various clinical findings.
• The Artificial Intelligence platform analyzes unstructured medical data such as radiology images, blood tests, EKGs, genomics, patient medical history to give doctors better insight into a patient’s real-time needs.

Precision medicine or personalized medicine is a subjective medicinal approach that allows doctors to select the most beneficial treatment option for the patient. The treatment is based on the patient's molecular signature, disease history, and present health condition. Artificial Intelligence is making remarkable applications in identification of disease pathways, discovering disease similarities, discovering new biomarkers, the processes of drug discovery, designing of new drugs, finding molecular mechanisms of pharmacological effects and analyzing the most responsive group of patients for a particular treatment.

Modern healthcare is heavily influenced by different technologies, such as Internet of Things, Medical Imagin, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Big Data.

• Each of them offers unique solutions to eliminate risks, decrease the possibility of an error, increase the efficiency of work processes.
• Artificial Intelligence based health monitoring allow an individual to closely monitor changes in vital signs and provide feedback to help maintain an optimal health status.
• If integrated into a Smart Healthcare system, these systems can even alert medical staff when life-threatening changes occur.
• It can provide a quick ambulance help if needed.
• Almost all consumers now have access to devices with sensors that can collect valuable data about their health.  From smartphones with step trackers to wearables heartbeat around the clock can be tracked.
• AI can provide earlier warnings for conditions like epileptic seizures or heart attacks, which often require intensive analysis of highly complex datasets.

Another application area is the telemedicine. Artificial Intelligence can assist in caring for patients remotely by monitoring their information through sensors. A wearable device may allow for constant monitoring of a patient and the ability to notice changes that may be less distinguishable by humans. The information can be compared to other data that has already been collected using artificial intelligence algorithms that alert physicians if there are any issues to be aware of.

Although Artificial Intelligence is used for high-risk diseases and on a larger scale, telehealth tools are being implemented into smart homes of patients to help treat and prevent high-risk situations while reducing hospital readmissions. Early detection, faster diagnostics, and updated treatment plan, reduce time and money for both the patient and hospital, while getting more immediate care. Artificial Intelligence is allowing for practitioners to make more efficient and logical decisions, improving the care for patients as a whole.

Another application of artificial intelligence is robotics surgery. Highly complex surgical robots that can either aid a human surgeon or execute operations by themselves.

Robotic surgeries have a very small margin-of-error and can consistently perform surgeries round-the-clock without getting exhausted. Since they operate with such a high degree of accuracy, they are less invasive than traditional methods, which potentially reduces the time patients spend in the hospital recovering.

Future uses for Artificial Intelligence include Brain-computer Interfaces (BCI) which are predicted to help those with trouble moving, speaking or with a spinal cord injury. The BCIs will use Artificial Intelligence to help these patients move and communicate by decoding neural activates.

Artificial Intelligence has emerged to be the next big thing in the field of technology. Self-driving cars have already shown us the first step to the future.